Cognitive Metaphysics

A proper metaphysics for cognitive performance.

The general failure to individuate component causes in cognitive performance suggests the need for an alternative metaphysics. The metaphysics of control hierarchy theory accommodates the fact of self-organization in nature and the possibility that intentional actions are self-organized. One key assumption is that interactions among processes dominate their intrinsic dynamics. Scaling relations...

Naturalizing Metaphysics with the Help of Cognitive Science

Humean metaphysics versus a metaphysics of powers

The paper considers the opposition between Humean metaphysics and the metaphysics of powers, focusing on laws, probabilities and causation. It argues that within Humean metaphysics, everything is a matter of contingency. Consequently, there is no deep metaphysical difference between a deterministic world and a world in which only probabilistic laws hold. This position is contrasted with the fou...

Modern Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question “What really exists?” The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this question and these answers dominate our view of how physics is done. Examples of questions which were originally metaphysical are the shape of the earth, the mo...

Jung’s metaphysics

Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system, I argue that Jung’s notion of the archetypes is one of his least understood concepts because it was nebulous to Jung himself. Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past, formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational agencie...